Osborne will need even-bigger cuts to stick to his plan

The Autumn Statement is now just over three weeks away and a sense of déjà vu hangs over the scene. In the run up to the same event last year it was plain that poor economic performance meant that the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) would be the bearer of bad news for the Chancellor. And so it is again.

After a grotty economic performance in 2011, last year’s Autumn Statement was always going to deliver bad news. The Chancellor announced the need for a £15bn reduction in overall spending by 2016-17 in order to meet the government’s fiscal mandate of eliminating the structural deficit in five years.

But that wasn’t the whole story. Much social security spending is driven by things beyond the government’s control: rising rents push up the housing benefit bill, and retiring baby boomers raise the overall cost of the basic state pension. So to constrain overall spending in the face of a rising benefits bill, the Treasury was implicitly seeking a further £11bn of savings. In total, the plan was then to find some £26bn in spending cuts – since tax rises weren’t part of the plan – by 2016-17 in order to achieve the government’s aims.

Unfortunately, this year things seem depressingly familiar. At the Budget, the OBR predicted that economic growth would be 0.8 per cent this year, but independent forecasters now think it will be more like a 0.3 per cent contraction. As a result, public borrowing is running 10 per cent above the OBR’s March forecast. None of this is great news, but it wouldn’t be so bad if the higher borrowing was a temporary reflection of the weakness in the economy that would resolve itself once things get back to normal. Unfortunately, the Social Market Foundation’s analysis – part of a joint report produced with the RSA yesterday - shows that this doesn’t seem to be the case. At least not according the models the OBR uses.

Unemployment has been falling for most of this year. While that’s a good news story in itself, it implies that the economy may have moved closer to its capacity. But with less far to bounce back, a bigger chunk of this year’s £122bn underlying annual government borrowing will remain when output finally does reach its full capacity. And the only way to fill that hole is to close the gap between revenue and spending.

Our analysis, using the OBR methodology, suggests that getting the government’s Budget 2012 plans back on track would require a further £22bn of spending cuts or tax rises by 2017-18. The Chancellor has some room to ease up on his plans and still hit his mandate, but whatever way you look at it, the OBR’s models suggest that a lot more fiscal pain is on the way. Combined with the cuts already planned, the total size of the task after 2014 could be £48bn by 2017-18.

If the Chancellor sticks to his plan to keep taxes unchanged and cut £10.5bn from the social security budget, most of the work will be done by cuts in public services. That would require 11 per cent real-terms budget reductions in every department over the first three years of the next parliament. And if health, education and international development spending were to be protected, the impact elsewhere would rise to an eye-watering 23 per cent.

All of this would come on top of the spending squeeze that’s already underway and planned to run until 2015. The consequences of the eight years of cuts would be to decimate spending in some areas, with some departments over 40 per cent smaller once the public finances are back to balance.

It must be hoped that the OBR’s models are wrong in their implications and that the economy is in fact still some distance from its potential level. But if the OBR’s advice follows it past form, the news will be grim, requiring cuts that will run deep into next parliament. Against a background of four years’ unprecedented cuts, a further squeeze on anything like the scale implied by the SMF’s analysis will represent the central issue at the next election, forcing on the electorate stark decisions about the kind of public services we want in the UK.

But we mustn’t have a re-run of the 2010 election, in which the three parties connived in presenting vague plans and disingenuous language to mask the scale of the problem. Osborne made a bold decision in setting up the independent OBR. Perhaps, before the next election he should make another, and require it publicly to adjudicate on the detail and viability of each of the main parties’ plans. If the electorate is to choose, it must be informed.

MP Michelle Thomson's full speech on rape at 14: "I am a survivor"

On Thursday, the independent MP for Edinburgh West Michelle Thomson used a debate marking the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women to describe her own experience of rape. Thomson, 51, said she wanted to break the taboo among her generation about speaking about the subject.

MPs listening were visibly moved by the speech, and afterwards Thomson tweeted she was "overwhelmed" by the response.

Here is her speech in full:

I am going to relay an event that happened to me many years ago. I want to give a very personal perspective to help people, both in this place and outside, understand one element of sexual violence against women.

When I was 14, I was raped. As is common, it was by somebody who was known to me. He had offered to walk me home from a youth event. In those days, everybody walked everywhere - it was quite common. It was early evening. It was not dark. I was wearing— I am imagining and guessing—jeans and a sweatshirt. I knew my way around where I lived - I was very comfortable - and we went a slightly differently way, but I did not think anything of it. He told me that he wanted to show me something in a wooded area. At that point, I must admit that I was alarmed. I did have a warning bell, but I overrode that warning bell because I knew him and, therefore, there was a level of trust in place. To be honest, looking back at that point, I do not think I knew what rape was. It was not something that was talked about. My mother never talked to me about it, and I did not hear other girls or women talking about it.

It was mercifully quick and I remember first of all feeling surprise, then fear, then horror as I realised that I quite simply could not escape, because obviously he was stronger than me. There was no sense, even initially, of any sexual desire from him, which, looking back again, I suppose I find odd. My senses were absolutely numbed, and thinking about it now, 37 years later, I cannot remember hearing anything when I replay it in my mind. As a former professional musician who is very auditory, I find that quite telling. I now understand that your subconscious brain—not your conscious brain—decides on your behalf how you should respond: whether you take flight, whether you fight or whether you freeze. And I froze, I must be honest.

Afterwards I walked home alone. I was crying, I was cold and I was shivering. I now realise, of course, that that was the shock response. I did not tell my mother. I did not tell my father. I did not tell my friends. And I did not tell the police. I bottled it all up inside me. I hoped briefly—and appallingly—that I might be pregnant so that that would force a situation to help me control it. Of course, without support, the capacity and resources that I had within me to process it were very limited.

I was very ashamed. I was ashamed that I had “allowed this to happen to me”. I had a whole range of internal conversations: “I should have known. Why did I go that way? Why did I walk home with him? Why didn’t I understand the danger? I deserved it because I was too this, too that.” I felt that I was spoiled and impure, and I really felt revulsion towards myself.

Of course, I detached from the child that I had been up until then. Although in reality, at the age of 14, that was probably the start of my sexual awakening, at that time, remembering back, sex was “something that men did to women”, and perhaps this incident reinforced that early belief.​
I briefly sought favour elsewhere and I now understand that even a brief period of hypersexuality is about trying to make sense of an incident and reframing the most intimate of acts. My oldest friends, with whom I am still friends, must have sensed a change in me, but because I never told them they did not know of the cause. I allowed myself to drift away from them for quite a few years. Indeed, I found myself taking time off school and staying at home on my own, listening to music and reading and so on.

I did have a boyfriend in the later years of school and he was very supportive when I told him about it, but I could not make sense of my response - and it is my response that gives weight to the event. I carried that guilt, anger, fear, sadness and bitterness for years.

When I got married 12 years later, I felt that I had a duty tell my husband. I wanted him to understand why there was this swaddled kernel of extreme emotion at the very heart of me, which I knew he could sense. But for many years I simply could not say the words without crying—I could not say the words. It was only in my mid-40s that I took some steps to go and get help.

It had a huge effect on me and it fundamentally - and fatally - undermined my self-esteem, my confidence and my sense of self-worth. Despite this, I am blessed in my life: I have been happily married for 25 years. But if this was the effect of one small, albeit significant, event in my life stage, how must it be for those women who are carrying it on a day-by-day basis?

I thought carefully about whether I should speak about this today, and it was people’s intake of breath and the comment, “What? You’re going to talk about this?”, that motivated me to do it, because there is still a taboo about sharing this kind of information. Certainly for people of my generation, it is truly shocking to talk in public about this sort of thing.

As has been said, rape does not just affect the woman; it affects the family as well. Before my mother died early of cancer, I really wanted to tell her, but I could not bring myself to do it. I have a daughter and if something happened to her and she could not share it with me, I would be appalled. It was possibly cowardly, but it was an act of love that meant that I protected my mother.

As an adult, of course I now know that rape is not about sex at all - it is all about power and control, and it is a crime of violence. I still pick up on when the myths of rape are perpetuated form a male perspective: “Surely you could have fought him off. Did you scream loudly enough?” And the suggestion by some men that a woman is giving subtle hints or is making it up is outrageous. Those assumptions put the woman at the heart of cause, when she should be at the heart of effect. A rape happens when a man makes a decision to hurt someone he feels he can control. Rapes happen because of the rapist, not because of the victim.

We women in our society have to stand up for each other. We have to be courageous. We have to call things out and say where things are wrong. We have to support and nurture our sisters as we do with our sons. Like many women of my age, I have on occasion encountered other aggressive actions towards me, both in business and in politics. But one thing that I realise now is that I am not scared and he was. I am not scared. I am not a victim. I am a survivor.

Julia Rampen is the editor of The Staggers, The New Statesman's online rolling politics blog. She was previously deputy editor at Mirror Money Online and has worked as a financial journalist for several trade magazines.